Book Review

In Empires in World History Jane Burbank and
Frederick Cooper present a sweeping yet cogent and highly readable account of
empire from the Roman and Chinese empires in the third century BCE to the widespread
dismantling of colonial empires after the Second World War. While
twentieth century decolonization provides a logical endpoint, the book's
chronological starting place begs more explanation. The Roman and Chinese empires
of the third century BCE, as the authors point out, were hardly the first to
emerge on the world stage. Yet compared to their Assyrian, Persian, and
Egyptian predecessors, among others, Rome and China became enduring examples
for later empires. As Burbank and Cooper observe, they "both attained a huge
physical size, integrated commerce and production into economies of world scale
(the world that each of them created), devised institutions that sustained
state power for centuries, developed compelling cultural frameworks to explain
and promote their success, and assured, for long periods, acquiescence to
imperial power." (4) China's training of and dependence on a loyal class
of officials, for example, and Rome's ability to empower its citizenry (if only
in theory) were strategies of particular utility to subsequent empires.

The intervening chapters guide the
reader through over two thousand years of varied and flexible "imperial
repertoires," from Byzantium, the Islamic Caliphates, and the Carolingians, to
the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and to the expansion of
Ottoman and Habsburg power following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in
1453 and Habsburg's defeat of the remaining Islamic Caliphate at Granada in
1492, which ended Muslim rule in Iberia. Burbank and Cooper then shift to the
expansion of European commercial networks in Asia and the Americas, Russian
empire-building in Eurasia, China's push into Siberia, and later the United
States' expansion across North America. Thematic chapters in the second half of
the book explore the interplay of empire with nation and citizenship,
sovereignty, war, and revolution.

In demonstrating the versatility
and endurance of the imperial state, Empires in World History adroitly
challenges traditional narratives of world history that attribute significant
shifts in world politics since the early modern period to the rise of the
modern state (as defined in the "West"), or which suggest that nation-states
supplanted empires as ideas about popular rights and sovereignty gained
currency since the eighteenth century. Not only did empires endure well past
the eighteenth century, they were often inextricably intertwined with the
developing concerns of the "national" state. In many cases, contests over
"national" rights, sovereignty, and citizenship unfolded within a broader
imperial frame well into the twentieth century; "nation" and empire were not
inherently incompatible forms of state. Compared to the relatively recent birth
of the nation-state, moreover, empire has proven to be an exceptionally durable
political configuration over the last two millennia. With this historical
trajectory in mind, Burbank and Cooper speculate that history may one day
identify the nation-state--or at least its grip on political imaginations
worldwide--as a relatively fleeting phenomenon.

Despite
considerable variation in the structures and strategies of imperial rule across
time and space, the authors demonstrate that the endurance of empires often hinged
on their success in managing the inclusion of diverse populations into the
polity while maintaining (or in some cases constructing) distinctions among
them -- a process Frederick Cooper describes in his 2005 book Colonialism in
Question as balancing "the poles of incorporation and differentiation."1 The varied methods by which empires employed "the politics of difference" are a
central concern of Empires in World History. While in some cases this
involved a recognition of the diversity of peoples within the empire and how
this diversity could be used to suit imperial objectives (such as in the use of
indigenous intermediaries), in others difference was employed to draw a rigid
line between elite insiders and "barbarian" outsiders. The authors
suggest that by taking a longer view of empires and the colonial relations they
produced, and by broadening the geographical frame beyond European empires, a
more flexible repertoire of colonial difference emerges--one that complicates
the self/other, black/white, colonizer/colonized binaries so common in studies
of European colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet in
this way the novelty of their approach to "difference" is perhaps a bit
overstated. It seems to discount the work of post-colonial scholars who
have for a long time pointed to the enduring import of "difference" in the
colonial project while at the same time eschewing interpretive binaries in
favor of a more complicated understanding of colonial roles and relations.

Empires
in World History nonetheless provides fresh insight into the strategies of
imperial rule that have sustained empires over time. It includes nearly eighty
photos, illustrations and maps, an extensive index, and suggestions for further
reading on each chapter. It will be a useful text for both undergraduate
and graduate students, as well as general readers interested in imperial
histories.

Paula Hastings is Assistant Professor of History at the
University of Toronto, where she teaches courses in British imperial, World,
and Canadian histories. She can be reached at paula.hastings@utoronto.ca.

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